Category: SIF

Sitecore 9 is here, it’s in our lives, and we’re at the point where the projects we started at the beginning of the year are getting ready to roll out. That means we need to get our production environments ready. If you’re coming from the Sitecore 8.x and earlier world, this can be a challenge. There’s new databases, the xConnect service, security and certificate requirements, and of course our friend Solr is mandatory now. We have a new tool to help us get through all this, the Sitecore Install Framework (or SIF). It’s supposed to help us by automating our install steps, if you know how to use it.

Fortunately, Sitecore has really stepped up their documentation, especially with version 9. There’s a detailed guide on installing Sitecore 9, which covers a single instance (probably a local developer environment) and a scaled out production instance. However, when they say scaled out , they mean scaled out. There’s a script for every possible server role. In the real world, our environments don’t match what’s exactly in the documentation. For example, we often combine roles, or share hardware. We need to make some adjustments, and that’s when we start to go off the map.